Cameron Jamie's art has been described as a form of 'backyard
anthropology'.1 His attraction to
quirky pageants, ceremonies, contests and other commemorative or
group activities is transformed into multi-media performances,
films, drawings and object installations that are fascinating
visual records of what makes a givenculture tick. Favouring certain
aspects of lowbrow and popular culture, such as amateur and
professional wrestling on the American West Coast or European
Christmas traditions, he actively cultivates peculiar situations
that are indicative of deeply rooted beliefs or the hierarchies and
meanings of collective behaviour. Jamie, however, is no amateur
social scientist doing fieldwork with the required clinical
objectivity; nor does he mock or judge with any sense of
superiority. In fact, one has the impression that he often
identifies, or at least sympathises, with his subjects, willingly
acting as a witness to and sometime instigator of the strange
pantomimes that are as revealing about his own predilections as
they are about the society from which they come.

The notions of 'distancing', exoticism, representation of
the other, and difference are inflected, reworked, readjusted as a
function of criteria no longer geographical or cultural but
methodological and even epistemological in nature: to make foreign
what appears familiar; to study the rituals and sacred sites of
contemporary institutions with the minute attention of an 'exotic'
ethnographer, and using his methods, to become observers observing
those others who are ourselves - and at the limit, this other who
is oneself...
Jean Jamin2

As an American living in France, Jamie already wears the mantle
of outsider, one who is able to observe cultural specificities
while remaining at a comfortable distance. His

Journal

Ceremoniously stripped of its currency, the social-documentary
project found itself under siege from both aesthetic formalist and
structuralist / post-structuralist positions that vied for
dominance over the nature and history of photography...

Journal

Titles aren't just the names of things, and a word about this
one is in order. In 1995 I asked Lily van der Stokker to take part
in a show I was organising for Galerie Jousse Seguin in Paris. The
gallery had a double identity...

Journal

A pack of younger artists have been responding tentatively to
modernist icons recently, throwing themselves at their feet while
chopping off their legs. In contrast, Jim Shaw's bold and
unfiltered take on the history of art...

Journal

One long, bright August evening in 2006, Michael Rakowitz and I
met on the South Side of Chicago to watch the Yankees play the
White Sox. It seemed the most fitting way to celebrate Rakowitz's
move to Chicago after a life largely spent in New York, since both
of us love baseball and he is a lifelong Yankees fan...

Journal

From mud baths to intestinal-looking roller-coasters made of old
timber and furniture, installations by gelitin, the four-man art
collective from Vienna, are chaotic, body-charging assemblages of
found debris and waste materials...

Journal

One of the most fruitful meta-curatorial practices of the
contemporary era has been the exploration of the
artist/curator/collector overlap - the act of sifting through a
museum's holdings to compile an exhibition...